


separate fact from fiction

by thistidalwave



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-05
Updated: 2012-10-05
Packaged: 2017-11-15 16:22:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thistidalwave/pseuds/thistidalwave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Niall is beautiful and nice and unique, and Conor is none of these things.</i>
</p><p>au in which conor is very sad and niall fixes this by being, well, himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	separate fact from fiction

Niall has been standing at the sink in the locker room for a good two minutes trying to get a grass stain off his palm, and has so far only managed to get it to fade to a lighter green that makes it look as if his skin is dying. Which he figures is good enough, really. He tried; his mum can’t yell at him about dirty hands at dinner.

He shuts off the tap, dries his hands on the sides of his trousers, and is turning to grab his bag when he hears the distinct sound of someone crying. He frowns. “Hello?”

The noises stop. Niall takes a hesitant step toward the stall he thought he heard the crying coming from. “Is someone here?” There’s no reply, but Niall spots feet moving under the door of the stall. He moves closer and knocks. “‘ey, mate, everything okay?”

The door swings open to reveal a boy Niall recognises as being in his year, his eyes red rimmed, a bruise blooming in light blue and purple under the left one, his bottom lip split open and bleeding. He licks at it and shrugs at Niall. “Sorry for, uh, being in the way,” he says, his voice a little shaky as he moves past Niall in the direction of the lockers. 

“Conor,” Niall says, remembering his name, and Conor starts, looking up from where he’s spinning his padlock. He just wants to get out, really, it’s terribly embarrassing to have been crying in the toilet--he’d thought everyone on the football team had already left, but of course not, this is his luck he’s talking about, so _of bloody course_ Niall fucking Horan would be in here. Maybe Conor will get off lightly and Niall will just make fun of him for being a pussy and then leave. Conor could handle that. “You live just over on sixth, yeah?”

Conor stares. “Um, yeah?” Apparently Niall, popular football player, not only knows his name, but also where he lives. This doesn’t seem like a good thing. Conor can think of tons of horrific things football players could do to his house.

Niall nods to himself. “I can walk home that way, too. It’s a bit out of my way, but do you want to walk home with me?”

Conor bites his lip and winces when it stings his cut. Niall winces, too, and goes over to the sink to wet a bit of paper towel. Conor watches in confusion, and instinctually flinches away when Niall steps closer to him. 

“Hey,” Niall says softly, “you’re bleeding, mate, just hold still.” Conor looks a wreck, all sad eyes and skewed tie, and Niall wishes he’d told the other guys on the team to stop making fun of Conor sooner. It’s not like he’d known they were going to beat him up--but he should have, so this is his fault. He dabs carefully at Conor’s lip, careful to get all the blood that’s been slowly working its way down his chin, then hands the paper to Conor. “Hold that on there for a bit. Y’alright?”

Conor nods, not trusting himself to speak. Niall is standing _right there_ , so close Conor can see freckles spread across his cheeks, and Conor’s heart has relocated from his chest to his throat.

“So,” Niall says, stepping away, “walking home?”

Conor finds himself nodding.

-

Niall is babbling on about some TV show Conor’s never seen, walking along like a beam of sunshine that doesn’t have a care in the world, while Conor walks a step behind and to the side of him, clinging to the strap of his backpack and trying to become invisible. 

“How’s your face?” Niall asks, and it takes Conor a moment to realise that he’s been asked a question.

“Oh, it’s still there, so all good.”

Niall snorts a little at that and has to actively stop himself from reaching out to run his fingers over Conor’s bruise, as if his touch would somehow be magical and take away Conor’s pain. “Does it hurt?”

Conor’s not sure why Niall is asking him this question. In fact, he’s not sure why Niall acknowledged his presence in the locker room, knows his name, knows where he lives, and is currently walking him home. He must be into doing some charity work or something. Maybe his grades are slipping.

Conor shakes his head. “Hey, uh, i--if someone sees us, you know it’s okay if you just say you’re trying to get me to do your homework or something? You can even push me down or whatever, I won’t mind.”

Niall has to remind himself to keep walking after Conor’s ‘offer’. Did he really just say that? Niall is taken aback, but he tries not to sound sick to his stomach. “Why would I do that?” 

He looks genuinely confused, but Conor doesn’t understand why he would be. He doesn’t understand why Niall is even walking with him right now and not giving him another black eye to complete the set. 

Conor shrugs and looks away. “This is my street, I’m good from here. You have to go the other way, right?”

Niall nods and watches as Conor takes a few steps away before reaching out and catching his arm. “Hey.”

Conor turns back, looking resigned, and Niall wonders what he thinks Niall’s going to do.

“Can I get your number?” Niall asks. “We can hang out sometime?”

“Uh, okay,” Conor says, because even though he doesn’t think Niall really wants to hang out with him, he’s more afraid of what Niall might do if he doesn’t give him his number. He doesn’t think, at this point, that he could take Niall being mean to him. 

Niall watches as Conor magically produces a black pen from somewhere on his person and offers him his arm to scrawl his number across. “I’ll text you,” he says when Conor’s done, and Conor shrugs. 

“See you,” he mumbles.

-

Niall does text Conor. He texts Conor _all the time_. Conor barely ever replies, but that doesn’t seem to discourage Niall in the slightest. He texts in the middle of class about how bored he is. He texts during football practice to complain about how tired he is. He texts about what Conor thinks must be literally every meal he eats, and Niall eats approximately six times a day and complains the rest of the time about how hungry he is. 

Sometimes Conor gets texts that make no sense, like _‘my ornge juice is pink’_ or ‘ _lou jus groped a football lol best action ive seen all day’_. He stares at those ones for awhile, but they never make more sense.

Niall intersperses all his complaining and random observations with invitations for Conor to hang out with him, but they always seem offhand and last minute, and Conor doesn’t trust it, so he always declines. Sometimes, when Conor is walking down the hall between classes, he catches sight of Niall’s hair out of the corner of his eye, just glimpses that he’s waving, but he never looks up because Niall is always with his friends from the football team and Conor doesn’t often fancy being beat up between Maths and English.

He’s starting to think, though, that he might fancy Niall a bit, because, well, shouldn’t he be a bit annoyed with all that texting? He isn’t; he just finds it endearing and amusing. And he’d accepted a long time ago that he was attracted to blokes, that was just another one of those things that made him strange and _different._

Fancying Niall is terrifying, and Conor wishes he could shut it off. Niall is beautiful and nice and unique, and Conor is none of these things. He doesn’t deserve Niall, and he hates himself for wishing he could have him anyway. 

-

“Hey,” Niall says, sitting down next to Conor. Conor looks up from the book he’s reading. “What’s up?”

Conor blinks. “Um, reading for class. Eating lunch. Why are you sitting here?”

Niall shrugs. “You always look lonely over here, and you never respond to my texts during lunch hour even though I can see you sitting here reading them.”

“I never respond to your texts at anytime,” Conor says without thinking, and immediately regrets it.

Niall just laughs. “Touché. Rude, that, starting to think you don’t like me.” He pauses, tapping his fingers nervously against the side of his tray, then adds, “Or maybe you really don’t? I can stop texting you if you hate me.”

“No,” Conor says, probably a little too quickly. “No, it’s fine, I just don’t have anything to say.”

“No need to be particularly witty or anything,” Niall says, grinning. “I’m not here to judge.”

Conor shrugs and marks his place in his book so that he can close it. “Want some of my food?” he asks Niall, because he feels like he has to do something about Niall sitting with him. He can see the guys Niall usually sits with across the cafeteria, laughing like they usually are, and it seems a lot more fun than Conor could ever imagine being. 

Niall looks amused. “I know I talk about food a lot, but I actually do have my own entire tray to eat. I’ll be fine. What are you reading?”

Conor takes the hint that the topic is closed and starts hesitantly telling Niall about his book. The bruise on his eye has faded to a pale yellow now, barely noticeable, but Niall can’t stop staring at it. He feels a strange sort of happiness mixed in with his anger that it’s there, because without it he probably would never talked to Conor, and he genuinely adores him. He hardly ever replies to Niall’s texts, granted, but when he does Niall nearly always laughs, and Niall’s doing his best not to be upset that Conor doesn’t ever want to hang out with him. Niall figures they just need to work up to that. He wouldn’t trust himself either.

-

One of the only classes Conor and Niall actually share is PE, which is simultaneously nice, because it’s the one class where not paying attention and talking instead is normal and therefore Niall can drift over to Conor and bother him, and horrible, because the rest of their classmates are downright terrible to Conor. 

They’re picking teams for a footie scrimmage--Liam and Andy have commandeered being captains, with Niall being picked for Liam’s team straight off--and Conor is, like almost always, the last person left and therefore supposed to be on Andy’s team. He doesn’t look too bothered, really; Niall supposes he’s used to it. 

Andy rolls his eyes, though, turning what Niall assumes is supposed to be a pleading expression toward their teacher. “Does he need to be on a team? I’d rather not see him on the field, Coach.”

The class laughs, no one even bothering to pretend they’re not, and Conor’s face turns bright red. Niall’s skin suddenly feels like it’s on fire, anger prickling through his veins, and he’s halfway to Andy, arm raised, before he even knows what he’s doing. Harry grabs at him, pulling him backward with a hissed, “Niall, _no_ , what are you doing?”

Niall glares at him, yanking his arm away. “You’d do well to shut up and stop being such a fucking cunt, thanks, Andy. We’ll have Conor on our team if you’re going to be such a shit captain. That’ll be fine, right, Coach?”

There’s a loaded silence--everyone is staring at Niall, probably wondering what the fuck his problem is. Their teacher is the first to recover, half-heartedly reprimanding Niall for language before conceding to the request and urging everyone to get the game started. Niall ignores Liam’s requests for him to play first line and goes to sit down on the bench next to Conor. 

“Y’alright?” he asks, bumping his shoulder against Conor’s. 

“What did you do that for?” Conor asks, staring at his feet. 

“Andy’s an asshole, that’s what I did that for,” Niall says, and it sounds so vehement and final that Conor is convinced, if only for that moment, that Niall really does genuinely like him.

-

“So, Nando’s,” Niall says the next day at lunch, sitting down next to Conor. 

Conor perks up, and Niall’s grin broadens. “What about Nando’s?”

“I noticed that if I text you about Nando’s, you’re about seventy percent more likely to respond. So clearly you like Nando’s. I, as you know, also like Nando’s. And that’s why we should go out to Nando’s for dinner tomorrow night.”

Conor blinks. “I--yeah. Okay.”

“Okay?” Niall asks, a bit incredulously. He’d really been expecting to have to do more convincing than that. He’d planned like three different versions of this speech on his way to school this morning.

“Okay,” Conor repeats. He’s always up for Nando’s, and this invite seems premeditated and genuine, and, well, Conor is still really starstruck with how Niall had nearly _punched_ Andy in PE yesterday. 

“Cool,” Niall says, still beaming at Conor. Conor smiles back, and Niall forgets how to breathe for a second.

-

They eat at Nando’s, and it’s fun. They goad each other into ordering extra hot chicken and subsequently pretend they’re not dying of too much spice even though their faces are bright red and they keep taking surreptitious and nonchalant sips of their water. 

It’s a good job that Conor’s face is already so red, really, because by the time they’re nearly done eating, Niall has worked his foot all the way up to Conor’s thigh and is smirking across the table at him. Conor is still really confused about Niall’s whole angle, to be honest, but he’s not sure he really minds where it’s going.

“Okay,” Niall says, dropping his foot to the floor and standing. “I’m going to show you a place now.”

“Is this place cooler than Nando’s?” Conor asks.

Niall laughs. “Almost.”

Conor narrows his eyes. “I don’t believe you. Nothing even comes close to Nando’s.”

“Just trust me,” Niall says, offering Conor his hand. For a second Conor looks like he isn’t going to take it, but then he flashes that brilliant smile at Niall and does.

-

“Is this the cupcake shop?” Conor asks. “Are you breaking into the cupcake shop right now?”

Niall laughs. “No, look, see, I’ve got a key.”

Conor raises his eyebrows. “You’ve got a key to the cupcake shop. Did you steal that?”

“My mum owns the place, actually,” Niall says, opening the door and punching in the security code. He turns to Conor and gestures grandly into the shop. “Welcome.”

Conor steps cautiously through the door, Niall following close behind him, letting the door close behind them and locking it for good measure. “What are we doing here?” Conor asks skeptically. 

“Cupcakes,” Niall says, like it’s an actual explanation. 

Well, Conor thinks wryly, it sort of is. 

Niall tells Conor he can have whatever kind he wants from the display case, and Conor spends probably fifteen minutes trying to decide while Niall laughs at his ranting about what kind of icing is ideal and how he’s supposed to pick just one cupcake. Niall finally takes pity on him and picks cupcakes for them both, and then, halfway through sitting on the floor behind the counter eating them, demands they swap. 

Conor’s concentrating so hard on eating his cupcake that he doesn’t even notice that Niall is saying something, and you’d think that maybe he’d notice Niall moving closer to him, and he sort of does, really, but he’s a _huge_ fan of cupcakes and he thinks this is actually Oreo flavoured and he might have died and gone to actual heaven, and then Niall is kissing him, tongue swiping over his upper lip, and-- _what_.

“Uh--”

“Sorry,” Niall says, looking anything but. “You had icing on your lip.”

Conor blinks twice. “And normal people totally kiss people instead of just pointing something like that out,” His mind is replaying the sensation of Niall’s tongue sliding along his upper lip over and over again. He’s trying not to freak out.

Niall laughs. “I never said I was normal.”

“No,” Conor admits, hesitating slightly, “you’re definitely not that.”

Niall looks like he might be going back in for another kiss. Conor stops him with his hand on Niall’s chest. “Why are you doing this?” His heart is racing, but he’s hoping Niall doesn’t notice. The night has been so fun, but this is almost too much. This is what _Conor_ wants, so in the real world, he should not be getting it at all. Conor should be back in the locker room crying pathetically, or at his house, wishing he was anywhere else but there. Anywhere but here. Anywhere but at a freaking cupcake shop at night with a boy who is far superior to him.

Niall frowns. “I like you? This is usually what happens when someone likes someone else, mate.”

Conor bites at the inside of his lip. “You’re really not just, I don’t know, doing this as a prank or because you feel sorry for me or something?”

Niall snorts. “No, sorry. I’m actually a nice person? Most of the time.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to get that,” Conor says. He takes a deep breath and exhales it out, thinking of something to break the short silence. “One moment, please, I need to finish my cupcake.”

Niall laughs again and lets Conor finish the last bite of his cupcake, licking off his fingers, before he pulls him in with a hand wrapped in his shirt and kisses him, properly this time.

-

If fancying Niall was terrifying, actually being with him could be likened to having to get up at 4 AM for the rest of his life. Conor still doesn’t think he deserves Niall on his best day, he’s still a little paranoid that Niall is secretly making fun of him, but Niall tells Conor frequently that he’s good looking and funny and worth spending time with, and Conor is, to his surprise, actually starting to believe it. 

It’s good, and Conor really isn’t just saying that because Niall would punch the lights out of anyone who messed with Conor and the entire school knows it. 

He’s more saying that because of the Nando’s.

**Author's Note:**

> None of this is my fault. I was just tweeting my thoughts, no one was supposed to enable my shipping ( _morgana_ ). And I _really_ shouldn't have let Becca anywhere near these balls of sunshine, as she is the equivalent of a freak winter snow storm.
> 
> (Alternatively, #blamefinchy.) 
> 
> There's more of this ship where this came from, only with 1000% more adorable pop star boyfriends. So there's that.


End file.
